...snippets from my experience of life in Bosnia and Herzegovina and beyond...

Friday, December 13, 2013

Bibles and Atlases!

Last night we finished up the Book Club at the Children's Home for this year... We started off by making cards for their teachers or our volunteers (or me!) and had a great time - so great that they mostly didn't want to stop at the end :)

Unfortunately, as a lot of the older kids have dropped out, we have lost half of the kids, so we only have 10 kids left in the book club, and as last night almost all of our 14 volunteers came along, I had the best problem I could have - too many volunteers! I love having that problem :) We were joined by some of the younger kids and so it balanced out in the end. I didn't manage to get any pictures, but take my word for it, these kids love cutting and pasting and drawing, so the cards were great, they had fun, and so did our volunteers!

We ended the evening by giving the children prizes... as we are a BOOK Club, the prizes were in the form of books. This was a little disappointing at first to some of the kids who were expecting what they get at the end of the school year - a package with sweets and chocolates, etc, but they mostly got over it as the books are great!

The books were either Children's Bibles or Atlases. The Atlases were prizes for the kids who got Bibles when we gave them two years ago - the rest of the kids are either new or were too young then to get them. The Bibles were a donation, and as we have zero money for this project, I needed to get some nice books for the others at a cheap price: and the Atlases were 75% off as they were slightly damaged :) I wanted to get books that were at least equally good as the Bibles, so the ones with the "other book" wouldn't be jealous, but in the end it was almost the other way round!

I also wrote each of the children a little card to go with the book with words of encouragement for them. This was something I always planned to do, but with having 20 kids in the club it was too daunting, but with less kids, I finally decided to make it happen... so something good came of the mass exodus! It really hit the spot with some of the kids: which was the point!

And at the end I took a couple of pictures (the kids without books are not in the Book Club - either too young or have dropped out) and this one is my favourite: crazy!

Next year we will try something different with the older kids to draw them back into the fold... but even with the 10 younger kids we have a great time!!

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Belinda Chaplin

ABOUT ME

I am a South African living and working in Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina. I have been here since 2003. Before that I was in Zenica, near Sarajevo, for 2 years.

I belong to an organisation called Youth with A Mission/YWAM and serve here as a volunteer for the Humanitarian Aid Organisation "MOST" ("Bridge"), which works alongside the local Protestant Church "Hriscanska Zajednica" ("Christian Fellowship").

I hope you enjoy seeing some of what I am up to, and how I experience life as I try to bring God's love in action to the people of Bosnia and Herzegovina.